Larry Clark, Return

Return

Larry Clark

Publisher
Stanley/Barker
Year
2024
Specifications
330 x 245 mms
72 pages
Bard Back, Silk screened, Flexible jacket

Larry Clark was 16 in 1962 when he and his friends started shooting Valo - a drug store nasal inhaler that contained a tremendous amount of amphetamine. Clark returned to his hometown of Tulsa at 20 after two years serving in Vietnam. Here he graduated from amphetamines to heroin, and upended traditional documentary photography, by turning his camera on himself and his social circle, producing a ground-breaking series of raw and intimate photographs chronicling the disintegration of the American dream. Clark’s deeply intimate images exposed the previously unseen lives of suburban American teenagers, living a transgressive, outlaw lifestyle, hanging out in crash pads and committing burglaries and armed robberies to score dope. A small number of these photographs would come to form ‘Tulsa’, a cornerstone of contemporary photography. 50 years on, Larry Clark has returned to his archive of vintage prints, crafting a powerful vision of his work from 1962-1973, to produce his new book ‘Return’, a meticulously printed, outsized monograph, which is as shocking today as it ever has been, even in a moment in which opioid addiction is more prevalent than ever before. “I’ve always been interested in small groups of marginalized people who no one would know about otherwise.  I photographed my friends over a ten-year period in this secret world that nobody else could have possibly come in and done except someone from the inside like me. You see us from the time we were teenagers up until our twenties and how everything changed and how we changed. There weren’t supposed to be drugs back then. It was supposed to be mom’s apple pie and white picket fences. When I started making work, I said, “Why can’t you show everything?” - Larry Clark

More by Larry Clark

More from Stanley/Barker

Spine Index, an archive of independent photobooks

FIND A
BOOK
/
If you leave this unticked you are logged out when you close the browser, or after 12 hours without activity. Cookies and privacy.
/
one year, or a range like 2015-2020
one or more, separated by commas
full or partial
a name, or design: / text: / edited: / translation: and a name

ARCHIVE

Loading…

PUBLISHER

#

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

V

W

X

Y

Z

ABOUT

The project

SpineIndex is an archive of independent books on photography and visual culture: photobooks, publications, design books and self-published editions — the kind of work that rarely makes it into bookshop windows or mainstream catalogues. It exists to document, connect, and keep visible a world of publishers, artists, and makers who operate outside conventional distribution. A living reference for anyone who takes this territory seriously — collectors, researchers, students, and the simply curious.

Images and rights

Covers, interior pages and descriptions are shown to introduce and identify the books, always crediting publisher, author and photographer and linking back to the publisher. We ask publishers for their permission, and we remove anything on request within 7 days. If you are a publisher, an author or a photographer and you want something changed or removed, write to info@spineindex.it.